Defying Gravity
by eyrianone
Summary: When they're together like this - it feels like flying. (Insert this between chapters Thirty Two and Thirty Three of 'Take You Break Me').


**Title: **Defying Gravity – A 'Take you Break me' interlude.

**Author:**eyrianone

**Rating:**M

**Disclaimer: **(From ViaLethe) – 'Words are mine. World ain't.'

**Summary: **All the months he was missing she was earth-bound and broken. Now that he's home – she can fly. (Insert this between chapters Thirty Two and Thirty Three of 'Take You Break Me').

* * *

'_**It's been too long and we've been down and out without laughter'.**_

_**Lyric by Hedley**_

* * *

His tongue slides into her mouth and it's a welcome intrusion. A shudder of pure, wanton need ripples throughout her body.

'_Oh God how she's missed this' _she thinks, missed both the simplicity and the complexity of his mouth upon hers. All the ways Castle can crack her wide open with just the brush of his lips and have her willing to grant him anything mere moments later. She knows no words could ever go deep enough to express how much she's craved the 'taste' of him. Or describe how she's dreamt about that urgent slide as he maps her mouth, marking her 'his' territory.

Or how it feels to have 'longing' finally answered as she gets to experience again that sensation where she breathes _through _him and they share oxygen. The insane delight that bubbles beneath her skin, as her lungs fill up with his air and she's invaded by him in another of his myriad ways. She loves him so much.

Loves him both deeply and desperately - she knows this now.

More than loves.

The long and empty months without him have marked her far too deeply for the simple word 'love', to adequately express ever again all that he truly is to her and everything that he makes her feel.

He is _life_.

And he is everything good and pure and real that it can contain for her.

He is _her _life.**  
**

The last five months have laid out in a cold and stark reality what she always feared the most before they got together – that losing him would be a devastation that she could never overcome.

Daily it was proven to her that she no longer stood alone, without him, because their love was so all-consuming they'd become the largest part of each other and the hole at the enter of her being – her life – that he should be filling was a gaping maelstrom destined to destroy her.

She knows that may not be completely healthy, that it is the result of damage they've previously sustained – but on the other side of that she also knows few people ever connect quite like this, or love with the intensity and passion that she and Castle have between them.

And despite the heartbreak and the fear of loss that even now sometimes seems so daunting, loving him is still worth everything.

It's a gift.

So as Castle eases her shirt off, his mouth momentarily abandoning her lips in favor of mapping the contour of her collarbone, she lets go of fear and worry and heartache, and instead Kate focuses on rejoicing in it - in the consuming emotions that he birthed in her so long ago and how amazing and exhilarating it feels that he's been restored to her.

Her fingers unconsciously tighten in his silky hair, reveling in the way it slides between her fingers. She buries her face against the top of his head, breathes deeply of his scent as she slides one hand down the length of his arm, amazed anew at the undeniable strength of him that's so vividly evident now in his large frame. Pure exhilaration is making her feel almost lightheaded already and it seems only right somehow, fitting just how damn high on all this vast emotion she really is.

* * *

The writer bites her shoulder lovingly as he eases the strap of her bra down her arm, his tanned skin a stark contrast to the pale whitewash of her arm. Kate's sickly pale now that he's really looking at her body, her curves less rounded than they are in his memory and all her sharp angles are more prominent.

She isn't frail though, far from it. In fact there's even more sinewy strength in her body now, it tells him she's been working out too, channeling her frustrations and her sense of helplessness into sparring sessions and a punching bag. He smiles against her milky skin, he can't help it – on the one hand he feels sorry for whomever she's been up against and on the other he knows from now on it's most likely to be him.

She could have kicked his ass before – and maybe she still will, but he'll give her a run for her money now, and he'll love and enjoy every last second of it.

Ridding her upper body of clothes entirely, Castle pins her beneath him, her arms held high over her head, imprisoned by his large hands. He looks down into her flushed and beautiful face, notes how the pink that heightens her coloring has managed to banish the previous sickly tone and brought her to life again.

His home coming has brought her back to life again.

"I _missed_ this," he whispers, leaning down to breathe the words across her lips. "I dreamt about it – about us together, so vividly Kate. God, there were nights it was like you were really with me, and waking up - it was a nightmare, a reality where I didn't want to be."

"For me as well," she whispers back. "My dreams were the only place you were. And every day I'd wake up and have to face again the fact that I didn't even know for sure you were still alive. My heart kept insisting you _had_ to be – but my mind . . . "

Kate trails off and so he finishes for her.

"Your mind insisted it could be otherwise."

She nods, and tears sheen a moment in her eyes, then she blinks very determinedly to force them away.

"It's okay," he tells her.

She shakes her head. Vehemently. Her hair tangling on the pillow beneath her head as self-loathing creeps onto her face.

"No it isn't," she insists. "Castle, it isn't at all. Every time I even allowed myself to think it I felt like I was betraying you somehow. That wherever you were you had to be counting on me to find you and so the thought would just pull me down and down – it was like drowning Castle, every second until I could push the thought away I couldn't even _breathe_."

He's stunned.

Staring at his chest to avoid his eyes she continues so softly he has to strain to even catch it.

"As time past I got more and more terrified that I was letting you down. That you were still gone because somehow I'd failed."

He kisses her hard, swift and brutal to force the words away. Lets his mouth apologize for all of it though he knows there was nothing he could have done. At least in his exile he was reassured everyday that she was okay – and it was that very reassurance, that watchdog footage that saved him. Swallowing hard he tries to picture what those months would have done to him without it. Kate stares up into his face unblinking and it's like a sledgehammer hits him. Her pale form and harder body tell him a part of it, but it's the remnants of the daily war she waged – shining with such clarity in her eyes, that tells him just how close this came to breaking her completely.

And the realization sets off a detonation within him. Urgency floods thickly through his veins. He's unable to subdue it, can't let up the onslaught of his kisses even as he tears the remaining clothing from their bodies, desperate for her.

"Yes," she murmurs into his mouth. "Please," she begs him, and her fingers dig into his muscles, her grip strong and unrelenting as she fights for their merger along with him.

* * *

There's no finesse to it at all. No foreplay beyond the quick greedy slide of his thick fingers against the entrance to her body, a sensation so stimulating, so craved in the five months of loneliness when she knew only the same motion from her own inadequate hand, that it has her bucking up beneath him – loud pleas falling from her lips. All he needs is a second to align them and then he thrusts home and suddenly all that was desperate and hurried - stands still.

Time - stands still, and the world stops revolving and the universe narrows until all it contains is the two of them – joined.

She smiles up at him then, eyes full and heart wide-open and Castle moves, strong and deep answering the siren call of her before she can even ask it of him.

It's completely effortless – it feels like flying.

Kate feels weightless as he drives her up, and she responds without thinking, her body moving in effortless counterpoint as she gazes up at him, down at him – her eyes drinking in the sight of him, held spellbound by the picture he makes. A picture both familiar and yet new, because physically there are changes, improvements she can't help but approve of in a purely superficial way.

He's more now, somehow. Not just physically stronger she senses, but more capable, more lethal, deadlier - than he ever could have been before.

And suddenly she understands the changes – sees that he's had to fight to make it back to her, she just knows it. And all that's 'more' about him now is so that he'll _never_ have to do it again.

And damn if that isn't just so – beautiful. He's beautiful – his body _and_ his soul, and she'll never _need_ anything other than just him.

"Kate, I love you."

Her smile widens, because his voice is undeniably beautiful too. It pulls her gaze back to his face as her pelvis tilts unconsciously and she wants to say it back to him, but he slams into her harder in the same moment and she loses all her breath as she shatters around him.

* * *

He can't follow, he can't follow, he mustn't follow - he chants it as Kate comes almost violently and her body bows, crashing upwards and into his and everywhere he feels her she tightens against and around him.

Release – glorious and life-affirming and his blood is alive with it instantly – with the utter need to see her experience it, the joy and the freedom of it - again.

"Kate," he whimpers. "Please baby – one more."

He's still hard within her when sight returns to her eyes, his voice an urgent whisper that she hears and can't deny.

"With you," she tells him, her now coherent hazel eyes on his. Palming the slick side of his face she pulls it down towards her, and once they're nose to nose she undulates her lower half to encourage him; a simple wordless plea for more sweet movement from him – with him again.

Castle complies.

The tension in his face is what does it for her, her body was blissfully satisfied seconds ago but tension looks good on her partner. Heightens the masculinity of his jaw, the ocean blue of his eyes – makes him irresistible.

Fingers widening and palms kissing they align their bodies even more completely. Friction builds, and when she slides her right leg a fraction higher and he growls at her its builds quickly.

The weight of him pins her down, the feel of him lights her up and he doesn't have to whisper that he can't hold it back any longer because she cries out a split second before he does.

Breathless moments later and they're laughing, a radiant joy on each of their faces that's too large to be contained.


End file.
